The excellent Biglorryblog gets invited out all over the place.  This week he’s been in Stuttgart, Germany at the Mercedes test track – lucky boy, can Tachoblog come next time please?

Anyway, proving that he was actually working whilst being there, Biglorryblog took the time to film Mercedes’ ‘Active Brake Assist’ system – reduces the risk of classic rear-end shunts when a truck runs into the back of a slow-moving car or queue of stationary traffic at high speeds – in action.

Biglorryblog told us that ‘the forward facing radar (which is part of the tractor’s Adaptive Cruise Control) detects this car bimbling along at 20km/h from about 110m away (the truck is travelling at 56km/h with the cruise control ON). As the gap closes, the truck driver gets a series of warnings on his dash display and if he still doesn’t do anything the system auomatically applies the service brakes to avoid a collision…as you see on my short video clip.

‘The car driver meanwhile carries on in complete ignorance not knowing how close he came to being hit up the rear by a 40-tonne Actros! I have to say it must take some nerve on the test driver’s part not to brake when everything tells you to!’